China’s State Media Slams Trump’s ‘Emotional Venting’ on Twitter

Propaganda at a museum in Sinchon, south of Pyongyang, North Korea, last month. China argues that the North will not return to negotiations unless the United States and its northeast Asian allies take conciliatory steps.Credit Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIJING — After President Trump pilloried China in 48 tweeted words, accusing it of failing to tame its neighbor and longtime ally North Korea, Beijing issued its own rebuke to Mr. Trump — in a cutting editorial of 1,000 Chinese characters from Xinhua, the official news agency.

“Trump is quite a personality, and he likes to tweet,” said the Xinhua response issued late Monday and widely displayed on Chinese news websites. “But emotional venting cannot become a guiding policy for solving the nuclear issue on the peninsula,” it said, referring to the divided Korean Peninsula.

The United States, it added, “must not continue spurning responsibility” for the volatile standoff with North Korea, “and even less should it stab China in the back.”

The unusually personal nature of the editorial, together with comments delivered earlier that day by China’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, show North Korea is becoming the main dispute threatening to tear at Mr. Trump’s initially friendly relationship with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

“I am very disappointed in China,” Mr. Trump declared on Twitter on Sunday, after North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile in defiance of United Nations sanctions.

China’s rebuke to Mr. Trump didn’t use exclamation marks. But the Xinhua editorial broke with Beijing’s usual public reticence when Mr. Trump has taken China to task over trade imbalances, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, Taiwan and other sources of tension.

“Taking out this outrage on China is clearly finding the wrong target,” it said, warning such broadsides could be dangerous.

“What the peninsula needs is immediately stamping out the fire, not adding kindling or, even worse, pouring oil on the flames,” Xinhua said. The tensions could, it added, “evolve into a localized conflict, or even the outbreak of war, with unthinkable repercussions.”

Chinese diplomats and the state news media have consistently argued that Washington and its allies should not rely so much on China to defuse tensions created by North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons and missile capabilities. On Friday, North Korea tested a ballistic missile that experts have said could have the range to hit California.

The United States secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, has turned up pressure on China to help isolate and cajole North Korea. “China and Russia bear unique and special responsibility for this growing threat to regional and global stability,” he said in a statement after the launch.

But the Chinese government argues that North Korea won’t back down and return to negotiations over its weapons programs unless the United States and its northeast Asian allies, South Korea and Japan, take conciliatory steps. In particular, China has proposed that North Korea freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for a halt to major military exercises by American and South Korean forces on the Korean Peninsula and off its coast.

As the tensions with North Korea have escalated, Mr. Trump has often treated Mr. Xi in public as a friend who was valiantly, though unsuccessfully, trying to bring North Korea around. “At least I know China tried!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter in June.

Now that friendly facade appears to be cracking. But Mr. Trump also has a long record of harsh criticisms of China, stretching back to his election campaign and much earlier. “China controls North Korea,” he said in 2013. “They are using the Norks to taunt us,” he said, using slang for North Koreas.

The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Liu Jieyi, said on Monday it was up to the United States and North Korea to find a solution to the current standoff, not China.

“People talk about China a lot,” he said at a news conference to mark the end of China’s July term in the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council. “If the two principal parties refuse to move toward what is required by the Security Council resolutions — de-escalation of tension, negotiations to achieve denuclearization and peace and stability and also resume dialogue — then no matter how capable China is, China’s efforts will not yield practical results because it depends on the two principal parties.”

He said that China had upheld United Nations sanctions against North Korea, while Pyongyang and Washington were heightening tensions by carrying out missile tests and the American side was raising the prospect of new, unilateral sanctions and even the potential for military strikes.

“Instead of de-escalating tension we see of course further testing that we oppose and we also see language and action from elsewhere that heightens tension, talking about ‘all options on the table,’” he said.

Mr. Liu also criticized the United States’ deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antimissile system in South Korea, which China opposes. He reiterated China’s support for a proposal to freeze North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests in exchange for the United States and South Korea halting large-scale military exercises on the Korean Peninsula.